Events move so fast that Davos already feels like old news. But four speeches in January 2026 captured the logic of how global power reproduces itself
The World Economic Forum’s January 2026 meeting in Davos convened under the motto “A Spirit of Dialogue.” In the Forum’s official parlance, this sounds like a promise: in a world where rules are breaking down and conflicts are mounting, elites are at least talking. Unofficially, it reads more like a warning: conversation is increasingly substituting for action.
Four distinct currents converged on a single stage—finance, techno-utopianism, radical free-marketism, and the resurgence of “middle powers.” Larry Fink (BlackRock) spoke of the need for “broad participation in growth” and the risks of AI concentration; Elon Musk—of a coming abundance through robots, AI, and energy; Javier Milei—of the morality and efficiency of the market, assailing “socialism”; Mark Carney—of the collapse of the old world order and the search for new cooperation among “middle powers.” Taken separately, these are familiar talking points. Taken together, they compose a portrait of an era in which “dialogue” has become a governing technology in its own right.
Davos as Infrastructure
The Forum is not merely a stage. It is a platform of access: membership tiers and invitations define who participates—and therefore the boundaries of the discussion. By various estimates, corporate dues and participation packages start at roughly $75,000 per year and run up to approximately $758,000 for “Strategic Partners,” with a separate registration fee typically charged per delegate. Terms vary by year and tier, but the underlying principle is stable: dialogue here is structurally configured as a conversation “among insiders.”
Fink: “Capitalism Must Evolve”—and I Will Engineer That Evolution
At Davos, Larry Fink plays a dual role. He runs BlackRock, which manages $11.5 trillion and ranks among the largest shareholders of the vast majority of S&P 500 corporations; its Aladdin platform services roughly $21.6 trillion in financial assets.²
He is the CEO of the world’s largest asset manager and, simultaneously, a temporary co-chair of the WEF. His central theme: “turn more people into participants in growth rather than spectators”—otherwise the system will forfeit its legitimacy.
“Capitalism has stopped working for most people,” Fink declared. Over the three decades he spent building that machine, the share of national wealth held by the richest 1% of Americans rose from 22.8% to 30.8%.³ Fink does not merely know these numbers—he is the architect of the system that produces them.
Fink criticizes the distribution of gains but not the mechanisms that extract them. He worries that AI “risks repeating the globalization scenario” and threatens jobs, yet BlackRock actively invests in the companies developing that very AI. He proposes relocating the Forum to Detroit—as though the problem were geography. The real issue is that three firms—BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street—collectively manage $24 trillion in assets,⁴ voting the pension savings of hundreds of millions of people. BlackRock alone manages $2.4 trillion in ESG assets and positions itself as the coordinator of a “green transition” estimated at $130 trillion by 2050.⁵
Fink’s strategy has a staffing infrastructure: a revolving-door mechanism reliably places his people in regulatory posts—Brian Deese became Director of the National Economic Council; Wally Adeyemo became Deputy Secretary of the Treasury.⁶
AI, ecology, inequality—each threat is converted into a market in which BlackRock serves as the indispensable intermediary.
Musk: A Gilded Cage with a Robot Butler
The richest man in the world, Elon Musk, who spent years deriding Davos as an “elitist affair,” shows up at the Forum and takes the stage for a conversation with that very same Fink.
Musk offers a world without politics: only technological problems and their technical solutions. An aging population? Robots. Not enough energy? Solar panels. “Consciousness is a tiny candle in utter darkness,” he says, and from this cosmology follows a business case: consciousness must be saved; SpaceX is the instrument of salvation; investors are participants in the mission. The question “Who owns the robots?” is never posed; the question “Who decides where abundance goes?” does not exist.
“Abundance for all”—the central thesis—on closer inspection turns out to be the formula for a new market. If robots produce everything, whoever owns the robots owns everything. Tesla manufactures Optimus. “Everyone will have their own robot”—but the iPhone, too, is something “everyone has,” and that is not democratization but dependence on an ecosystem. Without a mechanism for redistribution, “abundance” stays with the robot manufacturers. Musk proposes no such mechanism—he proposes that we trust abundance to distribute itself.
“For quality of life, it’s better to err on the side of optimism than to be a correct pessimist,” he concludes. But this is optimism for those who can afford it: aging is “solvable”—for those who can pay for the treatment; Mars is an insurance policy—for those who will fly. Meanwhile, Musk’s companies have received over $4.9 billion in government subsidies.⁷ By the logic of Ayn Rand herself, whom he quotes, Musk is not a producer but a “looter”: he lives off the very government transfers he condemns.
Milei: A Libertarian Facade for the Financial Leviathan
Argentine president Javier Milei drew enthusiastic applause and delivered a manifesto: the state as Leviathan, bureaucracy as parasite, taxation as robbery, the entrepreneur as hero. The diagnosis resonates with the lived experience of millions. But the applause of a hall filled with the world’s biggest financiers gives the game away: Milei attacks the governmental Leviathan while staying silent about the financial one. His enemy is the bureaucrat, not BlackRock. His libertarian critique is aimed at democratically elected institutions, leaving private concentrations of power outside the frame.
A substantial portion of the speech is devoted to the “mental virus” of woke ideology. But the woke agenda—ESG, diversity, inclusive rhetoric—does not threaten financial capital; it services it. Identity politics—whether left or right—shifts the focus from class contradictions to culture wars. While people fight over pronouns and statues, the question of wealth concentration drops out of the conversation.
Milei invokes “Judeo-Christian values,” yet all three Abrahamic traditions placed restrictions on usury—the halakhic prohibition of ribit, the Evangelical expulsion of the money-changers from the Temple, the Quranic riba. The legalization of interest occurred in spite of these traditions. The “return to roots” takes individual freedom but discards precisely what constrains financial capital.
Argentina as a “laboratory of reform” is something Latin American history has already tested: Chile under Pinochet, Argentina under Menem—temporary stabilization followed by crises.⁸
Davos does not applaud those who threaten Davos. The rapturous reaction of the hall is the best indicator of whose interests libertarian rhetoric serves.
Carney: Sovereignty Without a Soul
Canadian prime minister Mark Carney registers a different anxiety: the old “rules-based order” no longer functions, and the world is entering an era of competing blocs. Carney states bluntly: economic integration has become a tool of coercion.
His answer is to strengthen the autonomy and coordination of “middle powers” around trade, security, and technological standards.
“We no longer rely solely on the strength of our values but also on the value of our strength,” declared the Canadian prime minister. Doubling defense spending, developing the military-industrial complex—steps that do not resemble traditional Canadian rhetoric.
Canada has resources and a growing military resolve. What it does not have is an answer to the question: “Who are the Canadians, and why is this land theirs?” In place of a historical or cultural narrative—a “pluralistic society” and abstract values. A state without a soul is a luxury hotel: the guests enjoy the amenities, but they will check out at the first sign of trouble.
Canada, with a birth rate of 1.33, depends on immigration; a population not bound to its territory by sacred ties regards it as a place of residence rather than a homeland. In a world where the Westphalian order is unraveling, it is not those with the most resources who survive, but those who know what they are fighting for. And that is clearly not BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street.
The Four Horsemen of Change
Davos 2026 captured a moment when the legitimacy of global capitalism has been undermined to the point that even its architects acknowledge the problems.
Four speeches—four versions of a single operation: acknowledging problems without raising the question of their structural causes. Fink criticizes distribution but not the mechanisms that produce it. Musk depoliticizes inequality, recasting it as an engineering challenge. Milei attacks the state but not the financial oligopoly. Carney calls for strength but cannot articulate for the sake of what society.
Meanwhile, the conditions for anyone to challenge this logic are being systematically dismantled. Unions—from 35% of the labor force in the 1950s to 10% today.¹⁰ The gig economy atomizes: there is no shared workplace, no shared schedule, no visible adversary—how do you boycott BlackRock when it holds your pension savings? Systemic problems are individualized: climate becomes recycling; exploitation becomes time management.
Milei’s libertarian rhetoric amplifies this tendency; Musk’s technological solutionism—the belief that any social problem can be solved with technology—turns politics into engineering; Fink’s “dialogue” replaces action with conversation. The Forum’s motto—”A Spirit of Dialogue”—is the perfect name for this strategy.
The Four Horsemen of Change herald the approaching radical rift between elites and the rest of the planet’s population. And the world, it seems, is waiting for a force that would halt this headlong gallop toward wealth and absolute power in the hands of a narrow circle.
Notes
¹ WEF participation costs: Strategic Partnership up to CHF 600,000–700,000/year; badges up to $35,000 per delegate. Wikipedia: World Economic Forum; Fortune, Jan 2026: How much does it cost to go to Davos. Figures of 850 CEOs and 65 heads of state from the WEF 2026 press release.
² BlackRock AUM: $11.6 trillion at year-end 2024 (annual report), $12.53 trillion as of June 30, 2025, $14.04 trillion at year-end 2025. BlackRock Q4 2024 Earnings Release; Morningstar, Jan 2026. Aladdin: $21.6 trillion—BlackRock Investment Stewardship Q1 2025 report: blackrock.com.
³ Share of the wealthiest 1% in U.S. national wealth: 22.8% (1989) → 30.8% (2024). Federal Reserve, Distributional Financial Accounts: FRED Series WFRBST01134; visualization: Visual Capitalist, Feb 2025.
⁴ Combined AUM of BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street: over $25 trillion as of Q2 2025 (BlackRock ~$12.5 trillion, Vanguard ~$9+ trillion, SSGA ~$4.3 trillion). Sources: BlackRock Wikipedia; Sparkco analysis; WTW Thinking Ahead Institute: 401kspecialist.com, Dec 2025.
⁵ Cost of the “green transition”: estimates range from $100 to $300 trillion by 2050. WEF/Barclays, Sep 2023; IEA, Net Zero by 2050 (2021, updated 2023): iea.org.
⁶ Brian Deese (head of BlackRock Sustainable Investing → Director of the NEC) and Wally Adeyemo (advisor to BlackRock CEO → Deputy Secretary of the Treasury). Bloomberg, Dec 2020; Revolving Door Project, Jun 2021; The New Republic, Nov 2020.
⁷ Government subsidies to Musk’s companies: $4.9 billion (2015 estimate; by 2025 the total had grown to ~$38 billion including contracts). Los Angeles Times, May 2015: via Good Jobs First; Washington Post, Feb 2025: washingtonpost.com.
⁸ Neoliberal reforms in Latin America: Argentina under Menem (1990s) → 2001 default. See Blustein, P. And the Money Kept Rolling In (and Out) (PublicAffairs, 2005); Stiglitz, J. Globalization and Its Discontents (Norton, 2002).
⁹ Birth rates: Israel—~2.85–3.0 (CBS Israel; Wikipedia: Demographics of Israel; Taub Center, 2024). Canada—1.33 (2022), 1.25 (2024—record low). Statistics Canada: statcan.gc.ca, Sep 2025; CBC, Jan 2024.
¹⁰ U.S. union membership: peak ~35% in 1954 → 9.9% in 2024. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Union Members Summary 2024; BLS Monthly Labor Review; U.S. Treasury: Labor Unions and the U.S. Economy.